They get drunk on sour milk. They have two hearts and bald, spotted heads. They're highly intelligent, but if you drop them in seawater they'll melt into a puddle of goop. They're "Newcomers," and they arrived as refugees in a massive alien slave-ship, quarantined for three years and then reluctantly accepted as citizens of Earth. To some humans--including seasoned Los Angeles cop Matt Sykes (James Caan)--the Newcomers are unwelcome "slags." Sykes's own virulent "speciesism" intensifies when Newcomer thugs kill his partner, but he sees logic in teaming up with Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), the first Newcomer detective in the LAPD. Francisco's Newcomer knowledge is vital to their investigation of an alien drug ring, and a friendship grows from life-or-death circumstances.

alien nation

Great movie

Neat concept executed like any other cop movie.

Do you like cop movies? If you do then you're in luck. Alien Nation is essentially a cop movie... with aliens. The fact that it is just a cop movie with aliens is what makes this movie a little groundbreaking. However like any other genre of movies, this cop movie isn't perfect. It falls into some of the same trappings of most cop movies. In spite of that Alien Nation is innovative in the science fiction genre, even if the innovation itself has been played out to nausea elsewhere.

This isn't high cop drama like Black Rain or Heat. It isn't necessarily low cop drama either like V.I. Warshowski or The Rookie. The cop drama part is pretty much in the middle. So what makes it innovative? Well... it's the aliens. One of the things that make really good science fiction is when aspects of real life get represented in another fashion. Films like Aliens with their Viet Nam War contrast, Contact with its spiritual belief contrast, and V with their Holocaust similarities all stand out above the crowd because they compare their situations with real issues. Alien Nation does the same. Not with the buddy cop themes but with the themes of racial hatred and discrimination. Instead of some other ethnic minority you get alien refugees from another planet. You get all the parallels of bigotry in modern society in this film, and they address it in a concise manner.

That been said it's still a cop movie overall. Oddly matched police officers learning to accept each other, drug lord looking to take over, lots of gunplay and cop jokes... they all end up here. This aspect of the movie is merely average. Just like all the other cop movies you have seen over the decades. The cinematography, settings, script, and style all fall victims to the cop movie theme as they are all nothing to really write home about when compared to other police films. This doesn't mean the script, cinematography and other stuff I mentioned is bad. It just doesn't stand out above the crowd.

Appreciate Alien Nation for what it is: a parallel to society's discrimination against people different than us. Understand the fact that the vehicle they used to portray this, and it was an appropriate one at that, was a clichéd cop plot. If you like cop movies and Sci-Fi then you found a winner here. For the rest of you I won't say it's an overall great movie, but I will say it's a pretty good one.

One of the best....

This was one of the best attempts at what a multi racial society might go through in growing pains...There was alot of thought here and unlike the pitiful series that came later, no attempt at PC thought. James Caan put in one of his best parts here since Gardens of Stone and made the movie beliveable for its portrait of racial interplay. One sees just how quick sympathy disppears for the newcomers (refugees, freedmen etc) It is a good analogy for the world at large with drug problems, interplay between 2 TOTALLY different species et al.